Photography did threaten a large number of painters livelihoods.

No, it did not. The story is missing a critical component: anyone who had the money to commission a paint would still do it. Anyone who didn’t, wouldn’t. If anything, photography expanded the portrait market to those people who couldn’t afford a painting.

And if you’re going to put the bar of art as simply eliciting a human emotion reaction or feeling. Then by your own definition AI generated art is art.

I didn’t say that. I said that art requires skill as well, and skill in art, in order to elicit a human emotion necessarily involves a purpose that is worthwhile. Otherwise everything, from trolling to taking a dump, could be considered art, and it is not.

You could argue that prompting a LLM is a skill and it could carry a purpose, but I fundamentally disagree with that and I haven’t seen any AI creation that would lead me to change my mind just yet. Let’s put it this way: if I commission a paint, describe in the highest detail what I want in it, the painter does exactly what I asked them to do, and it turns out great, I wouldn’t be an artist, I would be a patron. Now, if the painter decides to just copy and rehash bits and pieces from other paintings with no purpose other than to hide their own inability to create, they would be a plagiarist, not an artist.

Going back to photography, it honestly sounds like your baseline is the skill required to capture something with the highest fidelity possible. Then yeah, painters would be thoroughly fucked. But photography as an art is way more than that, it’s about capturing a moment in the photographer’s own terms. And in that regard, it doesn’t differ from painting at all, unless you wanted to argue that Manet or Dali were trying to portrait the world as everyone sees it.

But AI art? Come on man, most people can barely verbalize what they want for dinner, how are they going to prompt a LLM to create art? “Paint the unbearable lightness of being, make no mistakes”?